As you may already know, Google is rolling out its neural network based machine translation system. It has various names, but Google refers to it as Google Cloud Translation or simply the "premium" service. It is supposed to be much better than their standard machine translation service. But what do you think?

"Orient Express" should not be hyphenated and Premium strangely translates the French proper name of the other line into Denglish ("Trainblau").
"among the most famous are" and "the most famous include" both seem perfectly fine.
I don't know how much the comma error (joining two independent clauses without a conjuction) is likely to bother most English readers. It is more or less standard and not problematic in German, but it is certainly not proper English, although it is possible that most people don't care.

The second example seems easier to understand with "Beyond Europe" at the beginning.
Here, both MT versions have failed to recognize that the "wurde" (from "werden") in the original sentence is used as a normal verb (= to become) and not as a helping verb indicating passive.
Without context it is impossible to say with certainty, but "was" (standard) seems much more likely to be the appropriate tense than "has been" (premium).

I had meant to reply to your other post on the subject a couple weeks ago, but never got around to it.
These are certainly not word-by-word translations, and the two examples are more or less properly constructed and do not significantly distort the meaning of the originals. They are perfectly adequate translations for most purposes.
However, I think these examples also seem like deceptively easy sentences (they look harder than they are). Some sentences in the other post had also already been completely or extensively translated in Wikipedia articles.

Google has a great press department, but I don't see any reason to believe that this is going to be able to deal with even marginally complex writing. The only difference is that "statistically based" has now replaced "rule-based" automated translation as the big, bad bogeyman.

On the other hand, the technology only has to become as good as the worst segment of human translators to become relevant for the translation market.

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Which language combination are you commenting on, David? They can't all be word-for-word -- the translations differ too much for that.

EN>FR and FR>EN mostly but the sentences in other languages are also very basic and short.
Word for word translation means that each word has been extracted from the
sentence of the source text and translated separately regardless of the meaning of the full sentence.Exactly
the kind of thing a translator shouldn't do.

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Lingua 5BBosnia and Herzegovina Local time: 16:18 English to Croatian + ...

Criteria.

Dec 16, 2016

Criteria when estimating human translation:

One non-native error in a 1k text = unacceptable

Criteria when estimating machine translation:

It now has 50 errors in 1k text instead of 80 errors like before = bravo, it progressed significantly. Now we can start selling the software and earning the money.

I can remember an ad by a US employer, it went something like this: "If I find only one non-native error in your quote, you will be immediately disqualified" (they were looking for native English speakers/writers).

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Lingua 5B wrote:
I can remember an ad by a US employer, it went something like this: "If I find only one non-native error in your quote, you will be immediately disqualified" (they were looking for native English speakers/writers).

Did you tell them that "immediately disqualified" is a non-native error? (-:

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Lingua 5BBosnia and Herzegovina Local time: 16:18 English to Croatian + ...

Machines can't read, humans can : )

Dec 16, 2016

Samuel Murray wrote:

Lingua 5B wrote:
I can remember an ad by a US employer, it went something like this: "If I find only one non-native error in your quote, you will be immediately disqualified" (they were looking for native English speakers/writers).

Did you tell them that "immediately disqualified" is a non-native error? (-:

I said clearly, the ad read "something like" (approximation), I didn't quote the exact ad. I was precise enough, but your reading wasn't : )

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Michele FaubleUnited States Local time: 08:18Member (2006) Norwegian to English + ...

Only one?

Dec 16, 2016

Samuel Murray wrote:

Lingua 5B wrote:
I can remember an ad by a US employer, it went something like this: "If I find only one non-native error in your quote, you will be immediately disqualified" (they were looking for native English speakers/writers).

Did you tell them that "immediately disqualified" is a non-native error? (-:

Nothing non-native about "immediately disqualified".

The real error is "only one". So two or more would be ok? What was meant was "even one".

[Edited at 2016-12-16 17:59 GMT]

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Did they intentionally pick some mediocre translations as an example of their product, for some reason? Some could pass for human quality, while others are blatantly "machined".

I think we can safely assume that not many among us will be out of work, at least not in the near future.

Also, I have the impression that this kind of technology is reaching some kind of plateau, and still underperforming, given its huge expectations. Looks like it's stalling, or at least not developing as fast as expected.

Whatever progress they were/are/will be able to make is probably due more to an improvement in processing power, i.e. raw processor speed, than real conceptual advancements.

Not to mention that while the results may be barely acceptable when English is involved as source or target, they deteriorate very quickly when translating between any two languages other than English.

[Edited at 2016-12-16 19:26 GMT]

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- Apparently, four C-17's were either ordained or sorted/classified. You can "ordenar" something, in the sense of commanding someone to do something or ordering some goods/services, but the participle "ordenado" is not used for these situations.

- "Boeing C-17 Globemaster III grandes aviones de transporte" got the positions wrong: in Spanish, in a nominal group, the proper name comes at the end. Should be "grandes aviones de transporte Boeing C-17 Globemaster III". In the Standard version, the positions are even worse.

- In Standard, "Cuatro C-17 se les ordenó..." does not make grammatical sense. It could be understood that the four C-17's were commanded to do something.

In some aspects, Standard is better than Premium, because:
- "Royal Australian Air Force" would be naturally translated into Spanish, but is left as is by Premium.

- The preposition that goes with "capacidad" is "para" in this case, i.e. the new units will improve something that exists already. "Capacidad" + "de" would imply that the RAAF is not currently capable of operating at all outside Australia, and getting the new units allows them to begin operating. Maybe Standard just hit the nail by chance with "para", but in any case it is the correct option.

All things considered, Premium's translations are NOT at all better than the previous ones in the case of Spanish.

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